Mean Spirit

‘I know what they’re not actually saying, Marcus. I used to be a tabloid journalist.’

‘American tabloids are rather tame in comparison with ours.’

‘Jesus, most American porn is tame compared with your tabloids. What nobody seems to realize is this is a career they’re wrecking. Guy struggles along for years, bit-part acting, summer season, finally gets his break when he’s looking at a cold and lonely old age-’

‘That’s show business,’ Marcus said heartlessly. ‘All the same, one can’t help wondering who gave them the crucial background information. Obviously no use asking who particularly has it in for Lewis, when the entire entertainment industry’s riddled through with jealousy and back-stabbing. The answer is: every bastard who isn’t making as much money.’

‘Including you.’ Grayle dragged the phone over. ‘I’m gonna call the pub. Get him to come over here right now. Time like this, a guy needs friends. Even friends like you.’

Marcus snorted.

‘’Sides, we need to talk about last night.’

‘Nothing to talk about. Lewis blew it. It was beyond him. He hadn’t the faintest idea what he was doing. And when Persephone realized it, she just got out. A little too late, unfortunately.’

‘Marcus, that is just so simplistic.’

Marcus hit the table with the heel of his hand. ‘Well, I’m feeling fucking simplistic.’ He came to his feet, walked to the wall, began to pick at a piece of crumbling plaster near the door. ‘I just hope she’s all right.’

‘Jesus, Marcus …’ Grayle stood up, too. ‘What’s it gonna take? What is it gonna take to actually make you feel sore at Callard? The woman stays in your house, eats your food, borrows your friends, turns me into a murder suspect, then drives off without a damn word, leaving a pile of glass, and it’s still like poor Persephone. Jesus Chr-. Oh. Hi, Bobby.’

He wasn’t wearing a bashful smile. Or any particular expression at all. He carried a paperback. He put it on the table. There was a vaguely familiar face on the front of the book, guy with a raffish smile but cold eyes. Not, Grayle was supremely glad to note, the guy in the drawing that the wind blew away.

She glanced up at Bobby.

‘Page one hundred and ninety,’ he said.

Grayle picked up the book. ‘You’re kidding, right?’ Flicked over the pages. Around the middle of the book was a stack of photo-pages all together. Pictures of newspaper headlines, reproductions of news pictures — guy in handcuffs being led to a police van, bunch of guys in bow ties getting showered with champagne around a dinner table.

‘Over the page,’ Bobby said.

Grayle turned the page to find a police mugshot.

Underneath, the caption said,

Believe it or not, this is the only photo I could get of Clarence. He always hated having his picture taken.

‘Holy shit,’ Grayle said.

XXXVII

‘Well, well,’ Marcus said sourly. ‘If it isn’t the angel of fucking Death.’

And Cindy, while hurt, could understand the dismay. Marcus’s heart would have done a small leap when he saw a flash of blue skirt. She came back. Flinging wide the door to welcome back the prodigal daughter. Only to find, instead, his favourite deviant in twinset and pearls, hair fluffed out, with a fresh mauve rinse.

Cindy and Marcus looked at one another for two silent seconds before Cindy smiled his gentle, ironic smile, an old clown painting out his sorrow.

‘If I am going to be hanged, it seemed beholden on me to present a more tasteful figure upon the scaffold.’

Wearing men’s clothing last night had been a mistake. He had wanted to present to Miss Callard an image she could not deride, which would give her confidence. How foolish to allow his psychic responses to be inhibited by image and taste and diplomacy. The result was an overload of masculinity in the room, an imbalance. Cindy’s nose twitched in memory of the stench of the urinal sharpened with soiled lust, an unmistakable odour of male evil.

But the clothing had been only one of his errors. All of them the result of giving into material neuroses, worldly apprehensions, fear of public hatred, fear of penury.

Marcus, for once, was right to be suspicious. He scowled.

‘Suppose you’d better come in.’

* * *

At once he detected an electricity in the room. A dreadful excitement. At first falsely attributing it to the stack of morning papers on the table, the evidence for the prosecution.

Little Grayle, at least, seemed glad he’d returned. She rose, hugged him.

‘Jesus, why are they doing this to you?’

Cindy was stoical. ‘When things happen to us which we clearly cannot alter, little Grayle, we must ask ourselves what is to be learned from them. What they may be telling us abut ourselves that we were unwilling to recognize.’

‘Oh sure. Like you’ve been chosen as God’s tool to break the hold of the National Lottery on the public’s consciousness? Did the BBC respond yet?’

‘My career with the BBC is, you might say, in a state of cryogenic preservation. Someone may perhaps consider thawing me out in five years’ time.’

‘Cindy, can they just do this?’

‘I fear they have done it, lovely. Some years ago, the mandarins might have stood by me. Those days are gone.’

Bobby Maiden looked up from the Mirror. ‘This didn’t just happen, did it?’

‘Perhaps not.’

‘Somebody had to start it, didn’t they?’

‘I also tend to be sceptical about spontaneous combustion, Bobby, but I rather suspect we have something more important to discuss than the descent of Kelvyn Kite.’

He had seen the exchange of glances. Oh yes, something else had occurred in the aftermath of the explosive exit of Miss Persephone Callard.

Grayle said, ‘You better tell him, Bobby.’

This was the standard mugshot issued to the papers when Gary Seward’s long-time enforcer, Clarence Judge, escaped from police custody in 1976. Used many times since because Clarence always hated having his picture taken.

‘You could argue’, Maiden pointed out, ‘that I came across it browsing through Seward’s book, and it just stuck in my head. A famous picture of a minor gangland celebrity.’

‘Which was subconsciously stored’, Marcus said, ‘and surfaced in a moment of heightened consciousness during a meditative state induced by sitting around in the dark with a group of people who-’

‘Hey, whose side are you on?’ Grayle demanded.

‘Just giving the psychological explanation, Underhill.’

Maiden smiled to see Grayle setting up in opposition to Marcus, the way she often did, without realizing this was what Marcus intended.

Cindy examined the photo in Seward’s book. ‘It’s a face which seems to convey a brutal distrust of the entire human race.’

‘A criminal stereotype, in fact,’ said Marcus.

‘And another stereotype’, Grayle said, ‘is bad guys always having scars. I don’t see a scar in this photo.